Williams Inference

Anomaly - Volume 19

01 November 2001

It is better to aim at something and miss, than to aim at nothing at all and hit it.Anonymous

Anomalies Used in the Inference Process

Reports - Volume 28 (2001)  #15 Awareness of Risk

Gargoyle merchandise is more and more difficult to find. (Internet)

Reports - Volume 28 (2001)  #14 Free Agent Nation

One American worker in four is already a free agent. (Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation)

Reports - Volume 28 (2001)  #13 Viruses and Bacteria

A study from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine suggests that a virus causes or triggers some cases of schizophrenia. (Science News, Volume 159)

Reports - Volume 28 (2001)  #11 Morality

Reports - Volume 35 (2008)  #4 Morality Change

In Jupiter, Florida, about 2,500 parents of youth league athletes were required to sign a pledge of good conduct before their children could play. (The New York Times)

Thinking About Thinking More Intelligence Congress has approved a significant infusion of new spending for the nation's intelligence agencies. The U.S. intelligence budget is believed to be in the range of $27 billion to $30 billion. The current bill would increase this budget by nine percent. Stratfor, a private intelligence service, has more than 100,000 subscribers - many of them in the Fortune 500. Intelligence is 86 percent reading publicly available information and 15 percent spying. Stratfor claims to glean nearly all of its information from publicly available online sources. Williams Inference gleans all of its information from published material. Memberships in SCIP, The Society for Competitive Intelligence Program, are increasing. Barnes & Noble lists 57 titles with the keywords competitive intelligence. In the last few years, many CEOs have moved their companies' intelligence departments from basement to the executive suite. In short, intelligence is in demand. Jim Williams

Agriculture

Scientists at the University of Toronto have created a tomato plant capable of growing in salty water and soil. (Reuters)

A handful of counties in Maryland have begun offering "Farming 101" courses. "I've had 483 people run through the program," said an extension agent in Frederick County who started offering such a course five years ago. "They're just regular nonfarm people, like doctors, lawyers, mechanics." (Sun)

A new shrimp farm in the middle of the desert near Gila Bend, Ariz., is unique because shrimp farms have always been located near an ocean. Its shrimp are growing two or three times faster than coastal farms. Oceanside farms are running into problems with raw sewage, shrimp diseases, and parasites. (Furrow)

Business Behavior

A number of companies in Charlotte, N.C., including Bell South, First Union, Tribble Creative Group and Seurat, are encouraging workers to

McDonald's is testing a cashless payment system at 26 locations in Boise, Idaho. Customers wave a small, gray plastic wand in front of a sensor to pay for their meals. (AP)

"Whole businesses are developing around the body business," write the authors of Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age. "Companies [are making] commercial products out of corpses' bones. Some grind up the bones into powder that, when sprinkled on broken live bones, will help them mend." (Insight)

Last summer, J.C. Penney began auctioning off its 2001 spring clothes on eBay. Other companies such as Xerox, Sun Microsystems and IBM have also set up shop on eBay. "A lot of manufacturers are doing it incognito or through third parties," said Jordan Glazier, eBay's director of business development. (Wash Post)

Novartis of Switzerland announced that it would make its new cancer drug available on a sliding scale according to people's ability to pay. (FT)

Children

IQ scores have been soaring - 27 points in Britain since 1942, 24 points in the U.S. since 1918, 22 points in Argentina since 1964, with comparable gains throughout Western Europe, Canada, Japan, China, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. The rise is so sharp that the average child today is as bright as the near genius of yesteryear. (Newsweek)

"Everywhere I go, whether it's on vacation or at school, there are always kids who have camcorders," said Barry Burke, director of career technology education in Montgomery County, Md. "It's the thing to have now." (Wash Post)

China

China has copied Japan's production techniques far faster than Tokyo had expected. It is now threatening Japan not only in labor-intensive sectors such as textiles but also in areas such as computer manufacture. China last year exported more computers to the U.S. than Japan did. (FT)

Rapidly changing food tastes in China - which has no history of consuming milk-based products - has made it one of the biggest customers for New Zealand dairy goods. (FT)

Second homes in the country, campgrounds and lakeside inns are becoming more common throughout China - as are menu references to "country vegetables." (WSJ)

China recently outpaced Japan to become the No. buyer of U.S. soybeans and soybean products. (CSM)

China's announcement that it will be growing tea without using chemical fertilizers and pesticides is causing concern to organic tea producers in India. "China will be a big threat to our dominance of the world organic tea market," says a spokesman for India's largest producer of organic tea." (FT)

 

Consumer Behavior

When the D'Lance Golf driving range in Littleton, Colo., became a 24-hour club, its membership increased by 75%. (USA Today)

Multiple e-mail accounts have become so popular that Microsoft has started to promote that feature of its new Office XP software. And the latest version of Netscape has been designed to allow people to check as many accounts as preferable from one window. (NYT)

In Chicago, 275 Burger Kings now offer burgers for breakfast, rather than waiting until 10:30 a.m. (WSJ)

People in the U.S. are reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45%. (Wash Post)

Crime

According to international crime statistics, crime in France has now exceeded American levels. (Wash Times)

The number of gun deaths in the U.S. dropped more than 25% during the mid-1990s to the lowest level since 1966. (AP)

In February, Los Angeles authorities arrested three people for running a counterfeit Viagra operation so sophisticated that a Pfizer analysis of the product ranked it a nine out of a possible 10. "They had the lot numbers, the package inserts, the packaging," says Monette Cuevas, the LA County Department of Health Services pharmacist who examined the drugs. "You could not tell the difference." (USN&WR)

Demographics

For the first time in history, more adult Americans are living alone than there are nuclear families. (CSM)

New Census figures show that most Americans are geographical homebodies: 67% of native-born Americans say they are living in their state of birth - a figure virtually unchanged from 1990. (USA Today)

"Something is happening on the demographic front that has still not achieved anywhere near the attention it deserves. Birthrates and fertility rates are sinking like stones, in both the modern world and among the less-developed countries. I think we'll be losing global population faster than you would imagine." - Ben Wattenberg, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. (Wash Times)

Baby boomers are losing their dominance almost everywhere and for the first time are becoming concentrated in parts of New England and the Rockies, according to an analysis of census data. (USA Today)

For the first time since the 1970s, more whites are living in rural areas than in the centers of metropolitan areas. (USA Today)

 

Education

Massachusetts is the first state in the country to require that engineering be taught in all grade levels, K-12, of its public schools. (Tufts Magazine)

The city of San Jose, Calif., just passed a $212 million referendum to fund library construction - the largest of its kind in U.S. history. An estimated 1,200 new libraries were built across the country from 1994 to the end of 2000. (CSM)

Only 9 of 15,000 U.A.W. Ford employees in Ohio took advantage of a $4,200 grant provided by the company for distance education. (NYT)

Beginning this fall, entering freshman at Fairleigh Dickinson must take at least one course a year online. (NYT)

Propelled by a little-noted act of Congress, every accredited college and university in the country will now need to show that their students are actually learning. (AP)

Georgetown University is starting a new physics PhD program whose purpose will be to prepare graduates for work in the for-profit arena, not academia. (Wash Post)

The city of Chicago now offers a fee-based preschool program for $5,800 a year. In at least four states, including Indiana and Arizona, some districts have some form of fee-based preschool. (CSM)

 

Energy

General Motors says it has developed the first workable fuel cell to use gasoline. The technology has the potential to obtain 40% overall energy efficiency, which is about 50% better than a conventional internal combustion engine. (AFP)

Electric companies across the country have begun introducing pricing plans on a "real time" basis - every half-hour or hour, for example. And websites that post electricity prices and demand every few minutes are now under way. (AP)

Central power plants convert about 40% of the natural gas they burn into electricity delivered to the customer. On-site power plants can capture the waste heat and achieve efficiencies of as much as 90%. (Wash Post)

Harold Benich of Albion, Pa., used mail-order parts and an old diesel engine to assemble what is believed to be the nation's first motorcycle that runs entirely on soybean oil. (CSM)

In Detroit, a 1,200 foot-long superconducting cable weighing 250 pounds is being installed to replace 18,000 pounds of old copper cable weighing 18,000 pounds - the first time superconductor cable has served regular customers. (Wash Post)

Entertainment

General Motors will introduce a custom video game on the Internet that lets gamers race GM vehicles such as the Cavalier, Avalanche and Corvette. (WSJ)

A recent survey found that 42% of frequent game players are more than 35 years old. Online games drew about 35.1 million people in 2000. (WSJ)

Although DirecTV gained 840,000 new subscribers in the first quarter of the year, about 500,000 either left or were kicked off the system. Delinquent payments cause 70% of the churn at DirecTV. (USN&WR)

Environment

Orkin, the Atlanta-based pest control company, estimates a 20% nationwide increase in bedbug calls in the last two years. Florida's hotels in particular have placed 10 times as many bedbug-related calls to fumigators since 1999. (NYT)

To restore the nighttime sky, this summer, Connecticut became the first state to require almost all of its 189,000 street lamps to install "full-cutoff" fixtures that prevent light from glaring sideways or up into the sky. (CSM)

The Rio Grande has ceased to flow into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time in recorded history. The almost 2,000 mile long river stops 500 feet from the shore. (CSM)

Financial

According to the Federal Reserve, Americans, on average, own about 55% of their homes, compared with 86% in 1945. The home-equity figure has dropped 10 percentage points in the last decade. (WSJ)

American home loan borrowers of the year 2000 are falling behind on their monthly payments at a higher rate than any comparable group in nearly a decade. (Wash Post)

Equifax recently launched a daily credit-monitoring service that will immediately alert you by E-mail whenever an inquiry is made on your credit file or a new account is opened under your name. (USN&WR)

Government

Each of a new set of stamps from the Swiss Postal Service looks like a piece of chocolate. When scratched, they all smell just like milky Swiss chocolate. (Wash Times)

In last year's elections, only two incumbent members of the House of Representatives were defeated at the polls. (Wash Post)

Massachusetts has outlawed the dumping of TVs and computer monitors. The state had set up recycling collection centers with various groups, including the Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries, and the University of Massachusetts. (CSM)

Health & Medicine

In 1982, 7.1 million, or about 26%, of the 26.9 million elderly were disabled as measured by being unable to perform such daily activities as eating, bathing and getting dressed. By 1999, the total had dropped to 7 million, or 19.7%, despite the overall growth to 35.3 million of the population over age 65. (NYT)

By using a team approach to make decisions about patients in its ICU, Suburban Hospital near Washington, D.C., has cut the amount of time patients spend on ventilators by 23%. The team consists of a specially trained intensivist ( a doctor who specializes in intensive care medicine), a pharmacist, a social worker, a nutritionist, the chief ICU nurse, a respiratory therapist and a chaplain. (USA Today)

If a patient in Seattle or Pittsburgh wants a second opinion from a Harvard Medical School specialist, it's now available online - for $600. The service was started in the summer by Partners HealthCare System operating in 33 states. (CHE)

Surgeons in New York have performed a gallbladder operation on a patient in France by remote control, sending high-speed signals to robotic surgical tools - the first complete surgery to be done with a robot. (AP)

The bacteria that cause stomach ulcers are responsible for virtually all cases of stomach cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the world. (Reuters)

Animal experiments with conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) produced a 30% reduction in existing atherosclerotic plaque. "In animal experiments, nobody has ever reported anything like this. This stuff is just amazing," said David Kritchevsky of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. (Science News)

House calls are making a comeback. The first nationwide online listing of house-call doctors who are currently accepting new patients has been posted on the American Academy of Physicians web site (www.aahcp.org). MM)

Labor

This year, the number of workers who are 40 and above will surpass those under 40 for the first time. (WSJ)

Labor statisticians project that, by 2008, the number of workers over 55 will be three times the number of employees in what once might have been considered the prime working years, 25 to 44. (Sun)

Workers ages 20 to 24 have dropped out of the workforce this year faster than any other age group while workers 45 and over are actually entering. The reason? Companies are laying off their newest - and most unproductive - workers first. (USN&WR)

Despite a record number of library and information science graduates, a shortage of librarians exists across the country. At the annual conference of the American Library Association, only 481 job seekers showed up for 1,000 posted openings. (NYT)

Networks

The annual Christmas bird census conducted by Cornell University is moving to the Internet. Pioneering bird counters are putting microphones on their roofs that are attached to their home computers that are linked to Cornell. These mics pick up "chip calls," which are the beeps many birds make when they migrate. (Wash Post)

The number of Verizon phone lines connected to homes and businesses has declined for the first time in the company's history. (Wash Post)

The city of Houston launched a program to offer free e-mail and use of personal computer software to its 3 million area residents. (USA Today)

In August, Internet consultant Jeremiah Grossman, 24, breached Hotmail filters and accessed ID and credit card data on Passport, Microsoft's free Web-based e-mail service, with just one line of code. (USA Today)

Ontario's Lakehead University is setting up a campus network that university and telephone-company officials say will be the largest in North America to carry voice conversations using a basic Internet networking standard. (CHE)

Public Mood

In North Carolina, the governor said he would sign a bill allowing the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. (AP)

Before September 11th, the most widely read poet in the U.S. was the Muslim imam Jelaluddin Rumi, who lived eight centuries ago in eastern Turkey. In his "Shams-I-Tabriz," he went so far as to dismiss the terminology of Jew, Christian and Muslim as "false distinctions." (WSJ)

The Lady's First Hotel recently opened in the Seefeld district near central Zurich. The 28-room hotel is for women only. Men are allowed only the waiting area of the lobby. (NYT)

"Definitely, crosses have become a trend," said Angela Arambulo, the fashion director of Vibe magazine. In recent months crosses and other religious icons have been embraced not just by churchgoing Christians but rap stars, rockers and athletes, models and Hollywood moguls, regardless of their faith. (NYT)

Residents of Boise voted in the spring to increase property taxes for two years to raise $10 million to buy land in the Foothills, the rolling high desert outside the city. Voters in McHenry County, Ill., near Chicago, and in DeKalb County, Ga., in the Atlanta area, passed bond referendums to buy open space. (USA Today)

Russia

Russia is experiencing an unexpected labor shortage which is forcing many companies to look even outside the country to recruit workers. (FT)

"Now it's cool to be Russian again," says Misha Kozarev, general manager of a popular new radio network that plays nothing but homegrown rock. "Made in Russia" labels are showing up stores and supermarkets. Western companies that once found it easy to sell anything with English on the package now take pains to obscure their ownership of Russian brands. (Wash Post)

Moscow today has roughly as many billboards as does London, and it has put up virtually all of them in the last ten years. (NYT)

Technology

As recently as 1993, the state-of-the-art Pentium held some 5 million transistors; by 2007, Intel says it will etch 1 billion transistors on the same space. (IBD)

Scientists for the first time have linked multiple brain cells with silicon chips to create a part-mechanical, part-living electronic circuit. (Wash Post)